


Memory Box

by mari4212



Category: Firefly
Genre: Character Study, Character of Color, Gen, Post-Canon, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-30
Updated: 2009-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-05 12:31:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mari4212/pseuds/mari4212
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been Kaylee's idea. She'd gone around to everyone onboard Serenity and talked them into putting at least one thing in for Book to remember them by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory Box

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own Firefly. That's Joss Whedon's sandbox. I just like to play in it.
> 
> Thanks to ljmckay for the beta job.

They hadn't had the time, first time through, to mourn the dead. Or do more than a slap-dash check through the preacher's community for survivors.

So this trip back was more than just a chance to bury… She flinched at completing the thought, it hit wounds still too raw, but Zoe had never been one to let fear or hurt stop her.

To bury their friends, then. More than friends for her, for the rest of the crew.

But after the funerals were all over, after everyone had been buried and the words said over them, other tasks came due. Someone had to set things to rights, to clean up and to send folks' personal items on, them as had families still living.

They'd all been avoiding dealing with Book's rooms, though. Kaylee had been the first one to try, but she'd ended up bursting into tears each time she set foot past his door. The Captain might have been the one to do it, under other circumstances, but he was just too damn busy dealing with all that fell out of the Alliance business.

And Zoe didn't have any extra pain left in her for the preacher. She'd respected the man, but they'd never been close even when he was aboard _Serenity_. Whatever she'd felt when she'd seen him dead had faded into nothing when compared to everything else she'd been through after. And maybe doing this was just another way dancing around her hurt, avoiding the loss of Wash, but it still made her the best one to clear things up. So she was the one in the end to finish the job, to sort through the leftover belongings of their friend.

She'd done it often enough, towards the end of the war. More often than not, she was the only one calm enough after the battles to deal with things like that, to collect the leftover bits and pieces of the dead men's lives and pack it off in the boxes they'd send home. Someone had to keep their cool and get things done, and she'd ended up that one more often than not.

So she hadn't quite expected the pang she felt when she walked into Book's home. Even then, a couple of weeks after his death, the place still echoed with his presence in a way she hadn't planned for. It was small and dim, and there wasn't much there. He'd still retained that bit of monastery living that she'd seen of him onboard their ship. He'd never been one for belongings, Shepherd Book.

But what was there was laden with her memories of him. The old paper Bible that traveled everywhere with him was lying open on the unmade bed. Pages still stuck out oddly from where River had taped them back in more or less randomly. Or maybe not as random as it seemed at first glance. It was so hard to tell sometimes, whether River's doings were because of her ability to read the complexities of a situation better than the rest of them or because of her still being a bit crazy underneath it all. Zoe packed that into the box she'd brought in with her. River might want to keep it after all, or they could send it back to the Abbey that Book had been a part of before. Kaylee would remember which one it was, if they needed to send it. She was good with those sorts of details about people.

There was a packet of seeds in the top drawer of the bedside table. Apparently he'd been keeping them there until it was planting time. She tucked them in alongside the battered Bible. Wash and Kaylee had often tossed around the idea of setting up some hydroponics on-board, and the seeds might come in handy if their Captain ever agreed to it.

The other drawers were full of clothes. She stacked those on the floor, off to one side. They'd be useful on the ship; there was always a need for rags and good cloth. Maybe it would keep Jayne from messing with Simon's shirts for a few weeks, having a supply of good soft cotton to clean his guns with. When she'd finished that, she stripped the bedding as well. They could always use a few more sheets and blankets, and there was no sense letting them go to waste planetside.

That was the only reason she found the small box underneath the bed. The trailing blankets had hidden it before.

It took her a few minutes to recognize it: the memory-box Kaylee had insisted on putting together as soon as she'd heard that the Shepherd was leaving. She'd gone around to everyone on-board _Serenity_ and talked them into putting at least one thing in for Book to remember them by. They'd given it to him the day he'd left.

Kaylee had been the only one to see what everyone had placed in the box, since she'd been the one collecting things from the rest of them. Zoe hadn't even looked at the time to see what Wash had decided on. It hadn't seemed important back then, just another thing Kaylee did to make them into more of a family than they already were. But now? Now she needed even that little bit of her husband again, even if it was just something simple and thoughtless like her own trinket had been. She sat down on the bare mattress and gently lifted the lid.

Of course Wash's gift wouldn't be on top, even if she'd half-wished it would have been. Zoe knew she and Wash had been the first people on the ship that Kaylee had come to with this idea, so it made sense that their gifts would be at the bottom of the pile. She'd have to sort through everyone else's mementos first.

The first one had to be Kaylee's. A strip of soft pink gauze that Zoe recognized as being off of the fluffy dress she'd worn that one job, and it looked like Kaylee had further personalized it with a trailing bunch of strawberries embroidered in red all along the length of it. Tucked immediately underneath Kaylee's gift was a delicately folded origami crane that looked like it had been crafted from a page out of the Shepherd's Bible. River's gift, no doubt, a mix of sweetness and crazy. And next to it was a short hand-written note from Simon, a slightly stilted letter thanking Book for all he'd done for River over the past few months.

That one made her smile a bit, half-surprising herself. She hadn't thought she'd be able to smile again any time soon, but Simon's perpetual awkwardness with anything that didn't directly involve medicine, his sister, or sarcasm had been a running joke between her and Wash.

Next was a button, like one off a shirt, with a paper scrawled with "you know why, Preacher" pinned to it. Jayne's gift then, though it made no sense to her. But he'd always spent a good amount of time one-on-one with Book, so maybe it had come out of one of those conversations.

Below that was a filmy piece of cream silk wrapped around a small packet of powdered green tea. Inara and Book had always been the main tea-drinkers on-board. Next to it was a glittering gold cross that she couldn't help but recognize. Mal's gift then. Zoe had to wonder if their Shepherd had understood how much that gift said about Mal's opinion on him. She picked it up gently and coiled the chain to prevent it from tangling. He'd want it back, now that Book couldn't hold onto it for him.

Finally she'd reached the bottom layer, her gift and Wash's, and all of a sudden she found she couldn't look to see what was there. She reached in, sightless, and brushed her hand lightly over the hair-ties she'd tossed in, idly wondering if Book had remembered that afternoon and River's fright over his hair as well as she had. And then she felt it. Cold, molded plastic.

She knew what it was even before opening her eyes to confirm it. One of Wash's toy dinosaurs, his smallest. The one he never set out on the helm, because it was small enough to fall into the console and get tangled in the wires. She'd thought he'd lost it months ago.

She clutched it tightly, and the tears she hadn't been able to cry before then finally came.

Mal found her there, still sobbing, two hours later.


End file.
